Monday, January 23

Alarm.

The anti-fraud department of my bank called me this evening. So even just their introducing themselves was ominous. It turns out that they do a pretty good job of checking my account for unusual payment patterns, so spotted it pretty much immediately when someone else started using my credit card for online gambling yesterday. They blocked the payments pending verification from me, bless 'em.

I don't think anyone got my PIN, or they'd've been straight to a cash machine. And my other cards seem OK, so I don't think anyone's been at my wallet. Could always be the postman — or, more likely in our case, whoever lives at the house that the postman gives some of our mail to. (Our postman's not the brightest. He repeatedly gives us mail addressed to the petrol station up the road. We do, admittedly, have very similar addresses, but you'd think he might notice the lack of petrol pumps in our two-foot-deep front garden.) Or someone's been through our rubbish — we have a shredder, but maybe I missed something. The neighbours did spot a couple of guys hanging round the back of our house a few weeks ago; went out and threatened to set the wolves on them. That's wolves as in wolves: our next-door neighbours keep Canadian timber wolves. Beautiful animals. We had assumed that these loiterers were interested in the car or the back of the house, but, now I think about it, our bin's there too. And of course there's the Interweb. Maybe someone intercepted and decrypted a payment over Christmas. Or maybe someone hacked one of the sites that's storing my card's details. Hmm.

Bloody annoying, but kind of reassuring that the bank spotted it the moment it started.